This invention relates to digital equipment, and more particularly to the reconfiguration of communication protocols and commands of portable digital equipment to reflect local conditions.
Digital equipment such as computers, personal digital assistants (PDA's), digital personal organizers, etc. are in widespread use around the world. When digital equipment is moved to a new location, it may be necessary to reconfigure the equipment so that it may properly communicate with, for example, a local telephone system or local area network. For instance, it may be necessary to reconfigure the communication commands, processes and/or protocols of a portable computer based on the physical location of the device.
Reconfiguring the communication process may be necessary to facilitate the communication standards used in a particular country, or to acquire a particular dialing sequence and protocol for connecting to an information service, or other configuration parameters necessary to facilitate communications in a particular location. For example, it may be necessary to reconfigure communication protocols of a computer system as the computer system is moved from one area code to another, or is moved between nodes of a local area network.
The need to reconfigure a digital equipment based on its location is long-felt in the industry, although solutions to the need has only been partially been addressed in the prior art. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,134,648 a reconfigurable modem suitable for connecting data processing equipment to a plurality of different communication networks is disclosed. The modem's hardware is configured to facilitate the network standard of the particular country where the modem is located. An external coupling device is used for input the location of the modem, where the coupling device contains an identifier which corresponds to the network standard of a particular country. The modem reads the identifier from the coupling device and then reconfigures itself with the corresponding configuration data to facilitate the particular country's network.
A practical problem associated with this method of determining the modem's location is that the user must carry and connect the coupling devices which correspond to each country. Besides the inconvenience of having to carry and connect an extra device, the user must know which device is appropriate for any given location. If the user does not have the correct coupling device for a given location, the modem cannot be used. If the wrong coupling device is inserted, the system will, in all likelihood, not work. Also, there is some expense involved, since a separate coupling device must be purchased for each location in which the modem is to be used.
Another problem with this method is that while it reconfigures the modem so that it can be coupled to different communications networks, it does not reconfigure location-dependent data and commands stored within the digital equipment that is to be transmitted over the modem in order to form a communications link. For example, if a user desires to dial into one or more databases or networks in a home location, the method of the prior art does not automatically modify the telephone number to reflect the fact that the user is in a different location, e.g. a different country or area code. The user, therefore, still has to modify telephone dialing data associated with one or more communication programs so that the modem can correctly dial into the desired database or network.
A method currently used for configuring a communication process for accessing an information service is to have the user enter primary and secondary local access phone numbers as well as configure the modem for the appropriate protocol. The problem with this method is that the user must know the current location, the access phone numbers available for the location, and the communication protocol for each access number. Besides having to acquire the access numbers and communication protocol, the user must configure the communication process manually. It would be desirable to overcome this limitation of the prior art by having the computer system automatically dial into a proper node of the information service without requiring the manual reconfiguration of the computer system.
The aforementioned problems are compounded by the number of networks and databases a modern digital equipment may have access to. It is not at all unusual for a portable computer, for example, to be provided with a half dozen or so software programs that allow the computer to dial into a like number of different databases or networks. If the portable computer is moved frequently between geographic locations where, for example, the area code or the need for the long distance prefix "1" varies, a user must modify the dial-in number for each of those programs each time the personal computer is moved between area codes. This, obviously, is a wasteful and time-consuming process that would be desirable to avoid.